respect that arms inspire, when they are
destined to take or to defend human life.

I had heard that it was a religious quarrel—
a sort of polemic warfare between Protestants
and Catholics; and as such I had resolved
on stopping my ears, and listening to neither
side. But I soon found religion to be the
mere stalking-horse. Land tenure, and the
authority springing from it, formed a far more
vital point of the question. It was the
destruction of the patriarchal rule that terrified
the great house and landholders of Uri. It
formed a political and religious revolution,
chiefly because it would be a revolution in
property, also; or, what is the same thing, in
the laws and privileges that affect property.

There were found traits and
circumstances, too, in the family of Furstlein, that
would have given materials for a novel, had
one been inclined to expand truth, or embellish
it, by adding the might be to the was. For,
whilst the males of the family were known as
high mountaineers and high churchmen, the
daughter of the house had been betrothed to
a Moderate of Lucerne, and persisted in
remaining true to him, despite the madness on
either side; she was, of course, anathematised
by all. The circumstance added mildness,
tenderness, wisdom, and conviction to the female
voices of the great wooden house; and this
so increased the anger and impatience of the
lords of the creation, as to require a very
large consumption of sour wine and indigenous
tobacco to allay the super-excitement.

What added to the spirit and the choler of
the male Furstleins was, that they were a
military family. Their ancestors had no
doubt marched, at the sound of the horn of
Uri, to Morgarten and those other great
fields of Swiss victory. Latterly, however,
they had served the Kings of France and.
Naples, and the Pope; and the younger
brothers Furstlein had led forth companies
of the tall youth of the valley, where their
labour and appetites could well be spared, to
receive the military pay of such sovereigns as
preferred foreign to native troops. Though
nominally for the service of court and parade,
this was not without its risks. In 1790 and 1830,
the Swiss Guards perished for the Bourbons—
a Furstlein upon each occasion. But this
service of honour and profit was already
stopped, as far as France was concerned; and
the Swiss Diet had passed a law, forbidding
the levy of mercenary legions in any of
the cantons for foreign service. This was one
of the complaints of the mountaineers against
the deputies of the plain, who enacted the
part of philanthropists at the expense of the
poorer cantons. The youth of other regions
had something to emigrate upon: some were
watchmakers; some, travelling valets; some,
pastrycooks, or wood-carvers. But the
mountain-shepherd was by nature a soldier; his
rude language and education unfitting him
for almost any other calling. It was as
economists, as well as Royalists, that the
Furstleins complained that the mountain-
valleys were not permitted to send their
youth to foreign military service.

This had been the subject of most vehement
orations uttered in the Swiss Diet by the
mountain deputies. But the low countries of
Switzerland abound in political economists;
and they answered the mountaineers by
arguments that brought no consolation. They
said, that although land could not increase
with the natural increase of population, yet
that capital might, and ought to do so; and
that capital so saved and augmented, would
set the increased population to work even in
the forest cantons. They had water-power,
and a hundred species of industry to which it
might be turned. To this the rustic economists
of the mountains replied, that the
amassing of wealth was impossible in their
region; that the herds could not be increased
beyond the limits of the pasture; that the
extent of land growing the better kinds of corn,
had to be yearly preserved or rescued from
the river, which was as destructive below as
avalanches above; that agricultural improvements
which succeed in rendering the fields
of the plain country more productive, were
inapplicable in the hills; that the labourer,
though little employed in the winter, must be
fed; that nature had thus decreed, that the
inhabitants of the mountains should be
stationary in every way, growing neither richer,
nor more numerous, nor more vicious, nor
more free. They were what they had been
four hundred years before, and would be
four hundred years hence: at all of which
the philosophers of the plains snapped their
fingers in no very tolerant derision. They
even went further, and threatened the
mountaineers with a railroad through the
valley, that would supersede their high roads,
and their carts, their turnpikes, and travel,
and place their most remote habitations
within ten minutes' distance of the town and
its influence, and a few hours' distance from
Milan and other capitals. At this threat the
men of Uri grew pale; for that, indeed, they
imagined, would be the end of the world, as
well as of their property, their authority,
their old habits and beliefs of life. They had
fought hard for years, against steamers on
their lake, and now to have it threatened to
fire them up their valleys, was, indisputably,
the triumph of Satan.

I ventured once on this wordy occasion to
give utterance to an argument that gave
terrible offence, and very nearly caused my
being turned out of the house as a heathen
and a radical. And yet it was my
determination then, as now, not to trespass upon
politics. I merely hinted the expediency of a
portion of mountain and a portion of plain
being linked together by the closest ties of being
the same race and the same government. One
always having and supplying what the other
wants, forms a natural course of interchange
greater than even that between town and